Lomborg does believe in global warming and the need to address it. Granted I haven't read anything of his in at least half a decade, my memory is that most of his criticism is with how we choose to attack global warming and what is the best future way to limit the impact. I like interesting and well reasoned opinions. The largest problem I have with Lomborg is that people who do not believe in climate change or sensible environmental protections love to take quotes and opinions out of context and use him as a poster boy for there not being global warming.
I don't think it's a valid debate to use the Green New Deal as the benchmark for fighting climate change - it's DOA in the democratic party - I certainly don't support it. I don't see how it would cost $20T to cut CO2 levels back to sane levels. Moving onto nuclear power alone would have a significant impact, and electric vehicles are not that far away from being more practical than gasoline engines. That gets you well over half way there. If you develop fusion power, that would certainly make it conceivable to stop the worst of climate change - and a global fusion project might be what - a trillion or two tops? Human displacement from rising sea levels IS NOT the worst of climate change. It's the impact on the food supply and availability of clean water that is likely to be what breaks humanities back. Oceans are critical to most life on earth - including far inland. But the warming oceans are going to wreak havoc on the global ocean ecosystem. Crops around the world will also be affected tremendously. So I am very skeptical that stopping the worst of climate change will cost $20 Trillion - it will be far less. But the cost of not doing anything is going to be far higher than $20 Trillion when you consider the increase cost and availability for clean water and basic foods to feed 8 billion people.
For every 2 degrees increase in temp, the ball will carry an extra foot. This was addressed in the physics of baseball - great book - well before this whole debate arose. It's disappointing that people are so ignorant about basic science in this country they actually laugh at someone making a true statement.
*shrug* Sounds crazy and dumb to me too, at first. But... 1: Absent talking about cause, ball parks seem to be, based on averages, warmer this year than a baseline you could establish from say 1980-2010 or so. (NOAA data plot of global surface temps: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mntp/201904.png) 2: Physicists (and baseball people) claim that baseballs carry farther on warmer days in general. 3: If ballparks are even slightly warmer, that would probably contribute to a slightly greater chance for any well-hit fly ball to go out of the park. But, to the announcers credit, and unlike the video title, "global warming" was the last in a long line of possible causes for the home run spike. If it's involved at all, I would comfortably put it as the least implicated. Seems much more likely that players are hitting home runs more often b/c clubs want them to, fans want them to, and they're being selected based increasingly on their ability to hit them. LOL.
I read things like this and I die inside. Such pretentious vacuous grand eloquence. This only makes me further suspicious of climate change policy. This is up there with the NYT’s “soccer moms with SUVs are Nazis” opinion piece.
Yawn. You probably spent more time with a thesaurus than being outraged. Opinion pieces are like assholes... But you found out the grand plan! To bring back horse back riding and wind powered ships!
Fundamentally, you don't see climate change as a problem, so naturally anything about it will make you laugh.
Thirty years ago yesterday, "governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control." U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 29, 1989 UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study. ″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said. UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone. Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Excess carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity’s use of fossil fuels and burning of rain forests, the study says. The atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates, much like a greenhouse. The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown. The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago. Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″ He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees. ″Anything beyond that, and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels ... we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.″ He said there is time to act, but there is no time to waste. UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992. In May, delegates from 103 nations met in Nairobi, Kenya - where UNEP is based - and decided to open negotiations on the treaty next year. Nations will be asked to reduce the use of fossil fuels, cut the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane and fluorocarbons, and preserve the rain forests. ″We have no clear idea about the ecological minimum of green space that the planet needs to function effectively. What we do know is that we are destroying the tropical rain forest at the rate of 50 acres a minute, about one football field per second,″ said Brown. Each acre of rain forest can store 100 tons of carbon dioxide and reprocess it into oxygen. Brown suggested that compensating Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya for preserving rain forests may be necessary. The European Community is talking about a half-cent levy on each kilowatt- hour of fossil fuels to raise $55 million a year to protect the rain forests, and other direct subsidies may be possible, he said. The treaty could also call for improved energy efficiency, increasing conservation, and for developed nations to transfer technology to Third World nations to help them save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, said Brown. https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
more on the home runs issue in MLB: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/sports/baseball/mlb-baseballs-juiced.html but more sober analysis suggest pitchers' increasing velocity is causing the either/or result of strikeouts/homeruns: https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...grip-keeps-tightening/?utm_term=.9c9b79538b36 also in the WSJ: An MLB-commissioned scientific study last year that proved that the current ball has less drag, and is therefore more aerodynamic, than its predecessor, though the research failed to understand why exactly. Commissioner Rob Manfred said recently that this year’s batch of balls is even less air resistant than before. Rawlings, the MLB-owned company that manufactures the baseballs, insists that its processes and materials haven’t changed at its factory in Costa Rica where balls are stitched by hand. One possibility, Manfred said, is that manufacturing improvements have led to the rubber-coated cork inside the ball—called the “pill”—being closer to the center, which he says could reduce drag. https://www.wsj.com/articles/baseball-has-a-home-run-crisis-11562603173?mod=hp_major_pos9
more on the baseball issue https://www.usatoday.com/story/spor...ed-baseball-problem-home-run-rate/1869584001/
Then there's the fact that if we implemented the GND 100% and everything the climate alarmists wanted, we could cool the earth down...… by two degrees F. Yes, let's end western civilization for two degrees F.
I think you mean Celsius and I doubt you've done the math to determine the impact a 2 degree Celsius rise or fall in average global temperatures has on the human way of life.
more on the baseball issue https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/...ck&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Sports excerpt: It was the split-finger fastball that helped Masahiro Tanaka become a star in his native Japan and then jump to the United States and a $155 million contract with the Yankees in 2014. At its best, the pitch darts sharply inward and down against right-handed batters. Its drastic late movement has left batters whiffing a third of the time they have swung at it — managing a measly .195 batting average against Tanaka’s splitter from 2014 through last season. But like many puzzled pitchers around the majors these days, Tanaka has not been able to get his trademark pitch to behave quite the way it used to. He has clearly struggled this season — he was on pace for a career-high walk rate and earned run average (4.78) entering his start against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday. Tanaka did well early against the Orioles and took a 6-1 lead into the sixth inning, when he allowed four more runs and departed with one out. The Yankees ended up with a 9-6 win even though Tanaka allowed 10 hits, walked two batters and pushed his E.R.A. to 4.93. Analyzing his difficulties on the mound, Tanaka has identified a possible culprit, as have many other pitchers: the baseball itself. “You grip the ball, and it feels a little bit different,” Tanaka said recently through the interpreter Shingo Horie. “And then when you’re throwing with that difference in hand, obviously the movement of the ball becomes a little bit different, too.” To compensate for that unfamiliar feeling, Tanaka, 30, has begun tinkering with his grip, hoping to restore his mastery of the splitter. It’s no secret in this era of record home-run rates that many players believe the ball has changed. The Minnesota Twins are on pace to smash the season home run record of 267, which was set by the Yankees last year. And this year’s major league hitters could exceed the record 6,105 long balls hit last season by more than 600 homers. a study that was released last year and found that the ball had less drag, which allowed it to travel farther, but the researchers could not pinpoint the cause of the change. A report by The Athletic in June found that the seams of some 2019 balls were lower than those on the balls from 16 previous seasons, a change that would improve the aerodynamics. All of this led to more expressions of concern, both from established pitchers who are having stellar seasons — such as Washington’s Max Scherzer and Houston’s Justin Verlander, who claimed the balls were intentionally juiced for more home runs — and from those who are laboring, such as Tanaka and his Yankees teammate J.A. Happ. more at the link
It should be noted that there are likely multiple factors are play here. The hitters are changing, the pitchers are using different pitches, the ball is looking like it has changed a bit, and yes weather. I doubt an average increase of a degree or two makes all that much difference but that's not how weather works. You get warm nights and cool nights. And if you are getting more warmer nights - the ball on those nights travel a lot farther. And extra warm night would be an extra 10 feet which would have a measurable impact - especially early or late in a season.
California cities banning natural gas stoves to fight climate change. I predict people cooking on propane stoves using 20 pound bottles. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...59tXOhPGWusi3MCG3x3J4y6zMZmkvszFRpDLemZW4HMiw No more fire in the kitchen: Cities are banning natural gas in homes to save the planet Elizabeth Weise USA TODAY Published 10:33 ET Nov. 10, 2019 SAN FRANCISCO – Fix global warming or cook dinner on a gas stove? That’s the choice for people in 13 cities and one county in California that have enacted new zoning codes encouraging or requiring all-electric new construction. The codes, most of them passed since June, are meant to keep builders from running natural gas lines to new homes and apartments, with an eye toward creating fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources. For proponents, it's a change that must be made to fight climate change. For natural gas companies, it's a threat to their existence. And for some cooks who love to prepare food with flame, it's an unthinkable loss. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly methane, and produces 33% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change. “There’s no pathway to stabilizing the climate without phasing gas out of our homes and buildings. This is a must-do for the climate and a livable planet,” said Rachel Golden of the Sierra Club’s building electrification campaign. These new building codes come as local governments work to speed the transition from natural gas and other fossil fuels and toward the use of electricity from renewables, said Robert Jackson, a professor of energy and the environment at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. more at the link
Probably the most concerning facts for me in regards to climate change is the just unbelievable explosion in the human population seen in the 20th and 21st centures. In 1950 there was 2.5 billion people by 2100 it's projected there will be 11 billion people. I don't see how realistically we are going reel in carbon emissions when we are adding SO many people all of whom will contribute some level of carbon emissions even if we become more efficient in certain sectors. That problem doesn't get a lot of talk though.
